Linguist-Educator Exchange

I Can Help You Do Grammar!

One of the most misunderstood and misrepresented concepts in the study of PDE (Present-Day English) is verbal constructions, especially auxiliary verbs (“helping” verbs) and their roles. In English, one of the functions of auxiliary verbs is in the construction of interrogatives and negatives. If a declarative sentence has an auxiliary verb in its predicate, that auxiliary can be inverted wth the subject to form a closed interrogative (a yes-or-no question):

She can pick you up at seven.

Can she pick you up at seven?

That adorable baby has been sleeping well.

Has that adorable baby been sleeping well?

The Queen of England’s valet is coming over.

Is the Queen of England’s valet coming over?

The auxiliary also assists in negative constructions; the negator is placed between the first auxiliary and the following verb:

She will pick you up at seven.

She will not pick you up at seven.

That adorable baby has been sleeping well.

That adorable baby has not been sleeping well.

The Queen of England’s valet is coming over.

The Queen of England’s valet is not coming over.

When your declarative sentence has no auxiliary verb, then you need to add one for closed interrogative and negative constructions. But you don’t just add any old verb; you add some form of ‘do.’

She picks you up at seven.

Does she pick you up at seven?

She does not pick you up at seven.

That adorable baby slept well.

Did that adorable baby sleep well?

That adorable baby did not sleep well.

The Queen of England’s valet came over.

Did the Queen of England’s valet come over?

The Queen of England’s valet did not come over.

This auxiliary ‘do‘ is referred to in linguistics as Operator Do, Dummy Do, and Periphrastic Do. These interrogative and negative constructions — as well as other verbal constructions with auxiliaries — arose as Old English (c.500-1100 CE) evolved into Middle English (c.1100-1500 CE) — in fact, the Rise of Periphrastic Do is one of the hallmarks of Middle English grammatical development.

It. DOES. NOT. Have. Anything. To. Do. With. Celtic.

Begosh and begorrah.

See, this is the problem with just pulling graphics off the Internet when you have no real understanding to interrogate them. Some wack-job claims in a graphic on the Interwebs (which I refuse to share / perpetuate here in its entirety) that Celtic is responsible for Periphrastic Do in English (annotated):

Oh No He Didn’t!

This is just patently false. Here are the facts, from This Language, a River: A History of English (Smith & Kim, 2018), a clear and concise and beautiful textbook by two of my teachers:

The use of do as an auxiliary verb may have its origins as early as the O[ld] E[nglish] period, but by M[iddle] E[nglish], the construction that becomes the present-day pattern emerges more clearly:

Whan Phebus doth his bryghte bemes sprede… (Troilus & Criseyde, 1.54)

See? Nothing to do with Celtic. The Celts who inhabited the British Isles before the Common Era — and for whom Britain and British and also Brittany in France were named — when the Germanic mercenaries arrived in the 5th century CE were conquered by the Romans, and then conquered by the Anglo-Saxons by and large. Conquered people don’t generally contribute syntactic constructions to the conquerors’ language. To wit:

The Anglo-Saxons did absorb some words from the [Celtic] Britons, place names like Thames or Kent, and words for geological features like torr (a high, rocky peak), a common element in place names like Torcross. But the borrowing was quite limited…. In some ways, these patterns of borrowing are not unlike the borrowing that occurred in the American colonies when speakers of English borrowed native names for places ike Waukegan from Native American languages. Patterns of borrowings such as these, being so largely tied to physicality (as opposed to more deeply cultural kinds of borrowing), being chieflylexical (as opposed to grammatical), and numbering only about a dozen words in total, strongly suggest that Celtic-speaking peoples had little cultural influence among their conquerors.

~Smith & Kim

Features like the <-ing> participle, used in the progressive verbal construction (am running, was eating, will be studying…) — note, it’s a progressive aspect, not a *continuous *tense, the Periphrastic Do, and the loss of case/gender have NOTHING TO DO WITH CELTIC. It’s 100% Germanic. These are grammatical features, not lexical, and they did not really develop until the Middle English period, long after the conquered Celts were relegated to the far corners of the kingdom.

Here’s more from Smith & Kim, in their chapter on Middle English:

In the ME period we begin to witness the expansion of the verb phrase (e.g. the rise in frequency and types of periphrastic verb forms).

This has Nothing. To. Do. With. Celtic. At. All.

So the [Middle English] sound losses that we have been talking about obliterated a number of grammatical meanings…and weakened the entire system of case in the paradigm…

And

Noun classification according to grammatical gender becomes defunct.

Again, nothing t do with Celtic, for crying our loud.

How about this?

In OE the present participle (PDE: speaking) had the suffix -ende (e.g. sprecende [speaking]. In ME the familiar -ing replaces -ende in most dialects…. In OE and early ME, we find instances of the auxiliary verb be + the present participle both with -ende and -ing….

A colleague recently informed me of his belief that I “the level of content knowledge [I] demand … in grammar instruction” is unreasonable and discouraging to would-be scholars. That’s an interesting reprimand to offer someone who teaches grammar classes to people who understand nothing about grammar — that I hold people to a high standard if they are going to claim to understand grammar.

Wow.

You know, one of us has personal knowledge of what adults are capable of learning and understanding about English grammar, and one of us is only guessing.

It also strikes me as hypocritical that it’s somehow perfectly acceptable for people in this “scholar community” [sic] that I am so often lectured about to hold me to a very high standard of politeness and deference because it’s their opinion that I should be so held, and also acceptable that I am so often kicked out of Facebook groups, excoriated publicly, name-called, and harassed and threatened, because I don’t meet these totally subjective behavioral and personality-based standards.

See, the standards I want to hold people to are these: If someone is going to teach other people grammar — especially adults — that person should know how to tell the difference between a noun and an adjective. They should know the difference between form and function. They should understand that adverbs don’t always modify verbs. They should know how to interrogate Internet graphics that they want to share to make sure they’re accurate and from a reliable source. Likewise, if someone is going to try to teach people about the growth and structure of the English Language, they should actually have studied it, and they should have an understanding of how PDE grammatical forms developed historically so that they don’t fall for total rotten baloney like this bloody bloggy Celtic sausage-making and so they don’t continue to perpetuate these false understandings.

I am not mean or wrong to hold grammar teachers to such a standard. I’m not holding gas station attendants or certified public accountants or electrical engineers to a high grammar-knowledge standard. But people who make money teaching grammar? Absolutely. And for the love of God, that standard does not make me a bully. In fact, I regularly hear from people who appreciate it, because they can trust my integrity as a scholar and as a teacher.

This high expectation is not the same as people trying to hold me to some kind of standard of patience and politeness and tolerance of abject errors spread by “experts.” I do not owe politeness or patience to anyone who is lying to children and teachers, misrepresenting their expertise, or making excuses for the ignorance they are spreading. The thing is, this colleague doesn’t mind at all when I call out Louisa Moats or Malt Joshi or She Templeton on their spelling and grammar errors; it’s only when I call out someone he considers a friend.

That’s not scientific.

It also strikes me as interesting that a colleague — especially a male colleague — has no problem lecturing me about “offering time” to “deepen understanding” — but no one wants to offer me time to deepen my “patience” and “politeness,” even if I were interested in doing so. Of course it’s fine to take all the time you want to understand something, but maybe don’t try to teach a thing you have not yet had the time to come to understand. I’ve been learning, for example, about hypnosis in the treatment of sleep maintenance disorders, but that doesn’t make me a hypnotherapist, and I’m not offering online classes in hypnotherapy. It’s remarkable to me that some of my colleagues — male and female alike — have no problem expecting me to bear some politeness standard that is not even remotely empirical, and that lies outside of my area of expertise (I’m not a therapist or a sex worker; I don’t get paid to make people feel good), but the same people balk when I expect a teacher teaching other teachers to bear a knowledge standard in the subject area they are teaching.

Hogwash.

Seriously, go wash that hog, because it stinks.

* * * * *

This past week, I was celebrating a family member’s college graduation, and talking with my older brother. My brother’s educational background is in physics and business, and he is a muckety-muck in water management in the southwestern U.S. (He also happens to be an amateur linguist who has a Greek tattoo and a Russian license plate and translate hymns from Old Church Slavonic.) Over lunch, he described to my mother and me a regional meeting he recently attended. Needless to say, water management is contentious, and at times, he said, he has to tell stakeholders, “Let’s not pretend like there are simple solutions here.” I seized upon that let’s not pretend.

“When you tell people ‘Let’s to pretend,’ do they call you mean?” I asked him.

“No. I’m not the mean one,” he said.

“Interesting,” I said, “because in my field, when I say things like ‘Let’s not pretend like you actually know what a phoneme is’ or ‘Let’s not pretend like that never happens in phonics instruction,’ people complain and call me mean.

“That’s because you say it in a mean way,” he teased. Har-de-har-har. What that really means is that I am guilty of facts while female.

* * * * *

I’m starting a new round of Grammar for Grown-Ups — a class informed by my studies with Dr. Smith — a class that has radically changed and is continuing to change the understanding of grammar in this “scholarly community” — in March of 2019. It will be scheduled according to the needs of the first 10 people registered. Lock in your price now with a deposit before the New Year; prices are subject to change.

This class doesnot require any pre-requisites or prior grammatical knowledge; in fact, the more you think you know now, the more you’ll have to unlearn over the course of the year.

Do you want to understand English grammar? Does that sound good to you?

I don’t doubt it.

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5 Responses

Hi Gina, I love reading your posts. I found it particularly interesting that OE had a suffix -ende as I’m Danish (married to an Aussie and have lived here since 2000) and -ende is our -ing form. ‘He came running’ in Danish is ‘han kom løbende’. That’s so cool to know. Thanks for sharing and Happy Holidays!!!! Nella

Hi Nella — yes, that that Old English had has cognate suffixes in other Germanic languages. It was replaced by the expansion of the that Old English also had — and Danish has a cognate suffix as in betaling or kapring [I think].

The Germanic is cognate to the Latinate which derive from the Latin present participle suffix.

Hi, I love that you are offering this course! You mentioned that it will be scheduled according to the first ten people registered. What is your typical format? Are there synchronous and asynchronous sessions? Forum posts? Because my March schedule is a bit hard to predict I’d like to gauge how well this would work for me. Thank you!